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India’s digital ad market is booming. According to GroupM’s 2024 This Year, Next Year report, digital advertising in India is expected to cross ?82,542 crore by the end of 2025, growing at a compound annual rate of over 27%. The platforms are multiplying, the pipes are widening, and the dashboards are glowing. But behind the glossy façade, an uncomfortable question lingers in boardrooms, agency huddles, and marketing townhalls alike: how much of that spend is actually working?
The rise of “take rates”—the share of ad budgets that vanish into platform fees, data costs, fraud prevention layers, and intermediary commissions—has thrown brand marketers into a spiral of recalibration. In a performance-driven era where ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) dictates survival, many marketers now find themselves in a labyrinth of diminishing visibility and ballooning costs.
Ravi Karthik, Chief Marketing Officer of ACT Fibernet, describes this growing opacity as a systemic issue. “Customers are in these places. Whether it's online, WhatsApp, YouTube or Insta or whatever platforms you pick, customers are there,” he says. “If I need to reach my customers, or even on the connected TVs, I need to be present. So yes, there is a cost to it—and you have to be present.”
But the issue is no longer about mere presence. It's about control—or the loss of it. “What is, I think, the challenge many of us in brand marketing, or even from the business standpoint, face is not just the impact of a campaign, but how we control our brand communications,” he says. “Now if I say I want to give five frequency or eight frequency, I have no control. Or I don't even know if it's right. Because there is no third-party independent verifier.”
Karthik flags the lack of transparency as the crux of the issue. “The platforms will change their algorithm, and whatever you have built is gone—or it’s changed. Now there is absolutely nothing one can do other than build it again themselves. That trust, that transparency… it’s not there yet.”
It’s a sentiment echoed, and sharpened, by Yaron Tomchin, CEO of global ad tech firm Mobupps. “What we call ‘take rates’ are the silent killers of media efficiency,” he says. “In my experience, most marketers are partially aware that margins are being shaved at every layer, but they often underestimate just how deep the cut goes.”
Tomchin breaks down the media stack like a path paved with hidden toll booths. “Between DSP fees, SSP markups, agency commissions, data costs, and anti-fraud tools, it’s not uncommon for 40–60% of a brand’s spend to be lost before the first impression is even served.” His solution? Radical transparency. “Marketers need to rethink their partnerships and insist on supply-path clarity. This means working with partners who are willing to show the full chain: who is monetizing, where, and how.”
To that end, Mobupps has moved away from broad programmatic buys and toward building direct and semi-direct integrations. “Instead of routing everything through the traditional SSP/DSP stack, we developed hybrid integrations that reduce intermediary costs and give brands more control,” says Tomchin.
One tactic involves using SDK-based supply, where Mobupps has visibility into inventory, take rates, and performance. “We also adjusted our internal ROI benchmarks to account for ‘media leakage.’ For example, if a client requires a $50 CPA, we factor in the true media cost vs. gross spend and optimize based on net efficiency, not just top-line goals,” he says.
This theme of net impact—the actual value extracted after navigating the maze of ad tech—is at the heart of the conversation today. Rahul Vengalil, co-founder and CEO of tgthr, explains how this new reality is also reshaping the fundamental approach to audience targeting.
“Clients want efficiency. Clients say, ‘I want to target only this cohort which is a subset of my larger male TG—someone who is traveling in airlines frequently and owns a credit card and has a home loan,’” says Vengalil. The specificity is surgical—and expensive. “The vendor has to buy data from airline companies, or from a metro, or from financial institutes, or from XYZ number of different partners.”
The result is a fork in the strategic road. “Either you say,’ I don’t want to go so niche—I will do it from a very broad perspective and then create a brand aura for my brand.’ Or, if I am a BMW or a premium car brand, I only want to talk to the person who is going to buy me.” That kind of precision comes with its own premium. “You need the brand safety layer, the ad fraud layer, and others—and everything will then cost,” he points out.
Indeed, ad tech has become a complex stack of necessary evils. As the industry focuses more on hyper-personalisation, media efficiency, and ROI metrics, marketers must balance between belief and evidence. Vengalil puts it bluntly: “Either I just believe I have spent and it is being spent wisely—and so ignorance is also one way to do it—or you act on it and say, yes, I am ready to pay the premium for it. These are the only two options available.”
This mounting complexity is particularly salient in the Indian context, where digital ad spends are still outpacing the maturity of infrastructure. Despite the sector's rapid growth—set to make up 55% of all ad spend in India by 2025—industry watchdogs note that standards around transparency, viewability, and attribution remain fragmented. A 2023 Kantar report noted that while 72% of Indian marketers are increasing digital spends, less than 40% say they have clear visibility into their full media supply chain.
So what’s the way forward?
For Karthik, the need is for trustworthy, independent verification. “If there is a way to influence that and build that up and do that, then nothing like it. But that is where I have a bigger beef than me paying for a platform.”
For Tomchin, it’s about shifting the lens from gross to net. “Transparency should be contractual,” he says. “The brands that will win in the coming years are those that stop accepting opacity as the norm and start demanding fully traceable performance.”
For Vengalil, it’s about understanding the trade-off between scale and specificity, and deciding which one aligns with your brand’s strategic ethos.
What’s certain is that as India’s digital ad ecosystem matures, the days of blind buys and fuzzy metrics are numbered. As take rates continue to drain performance unless curbed, marketers are left with one clear mandate: follow the money—every rupee of it.
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